Me, talking about me, unselfconsciously.

If I owned business cards, they would say something like, Registered Clinical Hypnotherapist, or maybe Professional Intuitive, or perhaps most accurately, Cranky Lady.

But I don’t own business cards.

So if you’re thinking about working with me and want to know what I’m really about, here’s what you should know.

I’m a good grappler.

I believe we’ve solved all the easy problems and now all we have left are predicaments.

Problems have solutions. Of multiple responses to a problem, one option will show demonstrable advantage; that’s the solution.

But predicaments are problems with no solutions.

Faced with a predicament, all we can do is respond.

I’m good at grappling with how to respond in the face of predicament, calamity, crisis of faith, inner conflict and collective dilemma.

I’m comfortable with ambiguity, can hold tension, am willing to slow down and look at things that most people would want to distance themselves from, and I am willing to fail in public. (Quite good at that last one, actually.)

I’m strong.

I don’t know where it comes from, but I have a great capacity to bear witness.

My current motto is, “Beauty endures”.

I don’t mean that beautiful things last forever. I mean that I’m in love with resilience.

I mean that even when we don’t know what to do, we can know what is right and that the rightness is the thing – the spirit of, Let’s take this on, let’s not look away, let’s endure this because it must be endured, because it’s the right thing to do – that’s Beauty.

It has power. It requires courage to bring it forth. We know it in our bones.

As a therapeutic helper, I’m showing up for intimate connection with you.

In order to do so, I actively cultivate strong bonds with my partner and son, soul circle of friends, my therapist, and my clinical supervisor, my pets and garden, and the mountains and forests of the land I’m from.

I’m well supported so you can be well supported.

And I’m very protective of these relationships and the time they need.

I’m a synthesizer.

I draw out the connections between disparate systems to create theories and compositions of thought, which result in a greater capacity for change, adaptation and potent action.

I connect the dots. I give voice to undercurrents. I point to constellations.

Professionally, I’m a few things:

I don’t know what kind of job title you’d give those three things mashed together, but that’s essentially what I do. I see clients one-on-one and lead live immersive experiences. Making magic since 2008.

What I do is what my teacher, Diane Poole Heller, calls: “designing corrective experiences”. I help alleviate suffering, as quickly as possible but also in a way that allows the body to thoroughly metabolize what your brain is processing.

I work at the subconscious level, having trained in various forms of trance techniques with Dr.Brian Weiss, Dr.Jonni Gray and at the Horizon School of Hypnotherapy. I’m a former Board member of the Association of Registered Clinical Hypnotherapists and former Vice Chair of the Canadian Association of Counselling Hypnotherapists and Educators.

I’m currently a certification candidate in Diane Poole Heller‘s model of somatic attachment re-patterning, a body of trauma recovery work based on Somatic Experiencing. I have completed her in-person trainings for Healing Early Attachment Wounds, Creating Healthy Adult Relationships, and Working With Victim-Perpetrator Dynamics and Disorganized Attachment.

I’m a wayward past student of Stephen Jenkinson‘s Orphan Wisdom school and trained with author and intuition instructor, Judee Gee, in France. In days gone by I was a WSET-certified wine and spirits rep and studied cuisine, patisserie and catering at Le Cordon Bleu in Paris. My first major foray into entrepreneurship was as the owner of a high-end eco-friendly home furnishings store. I appeared in major print publications like The National Post and The Globe and Mail, and tv shows on HGTV.

I have a body of work.

I believe that therapeutic practitioners who work primarily in closed, intimate, private settings can better serve our clients and culture when we create expressions of our work that people can point to from the outside and say, “Oh, that’s what they’re about.”

For that reason, I speak, write, record interviews, create online courses and produce group events. That way, before you ever step into my office or join me in a video call, you have a chance to observe the way I am in the world.

If I were to curate the crème de la crème of my corpus, I’d point to these:

I swear a lot.

I’m less censored, crowd-pleasing, and inclined towards self-preservation than I used to be. I’ve become more skilled at suffering in full view so that others feel more comfortable around grief, rage and collective wounds.

I’m well on my way towards my highest goal which is to be a curmudgeonly old woman who takes no shit and bakes great cookies.

I’m a very nesty person.

We live on small urban homestead on the traditional territory of the Lekwungen speaking peoples, the Songhees and Esquimalt First Nations, in Victoria, BC, Canada.

We keep beehives, bunnies, and a bountiful garden. I grow ten varieties of David Austin English Roses and nearly 100 varieties of flowers on a largish lot in the middle of the city. We annually process about 2 tonnes of our homegrown or locally sourced food through canning, curing, cheesemaking, juicing, drying, fermenting and preserving. You can read all about it in Geez Magazine which did a feature article on us in the “apocalypse” issue. (It’s more inspiring than it sounds.)

My husband is a Behaviour Change and Sustainable Systems consultant, and my son is a prolific maker and talented artist. We’re pretty serious about this sustainability thing, and truly cherish our small and delicious life. When I grow up, I want to raise sheep.

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